


Handicap

by castles



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-01
Updated: 2012-06-01
Packaged: 2017-11-06 12:35:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/418987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/castles/pseuds/castles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From Charles's point of view, theirs had always been and would always be an unequal relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Handicap

From Charles's point of view, theirs had always been and would always be an unequal relationship. Because Charles had gazed deeply into Erik and loved everything Erik was. But Erik could never gaze back. Maybe it was a good thing, maybe if Erik or anyone else _could_ gaze back, see everything, they wouldn't like what they saw at all.  
  
But as it stood, Charles was fated to be the one to love more from the get go, so he was playing with a handicap by default.  
  
  
*  
  
Every death and imprisonment of his Brotherhood embittered Erik towards Charles more and more.  
  
"Mystique says helping you build back Cerebro was one of my greatest gifts to your ego, you know," Erik drawled. "This," he tapped his helmet, "was tipping the scale too much in my favor."  
  
Charles lifted his glass halfway to his mouth, then eyed the nearly full piss bag hanging beside his wheelchair and thought better of it.  
  
Erik went viciously on. "Sometimes I think letting you live is more trouble than it's worth. Maybe you'd serve us all better as a martyr."  
  
It was a testament to how old and tired this song and dance was getting that Charles didn't even blink. He rolled the chair back a bit and reached into the top drawer of his desk, picking one of the many scattered pennies there and sliding it across the desk to Erik.  
  
"Do your worst." 

  
*  
  
There was this one memory.  
  
It was their fifth day in the mansion.

Charles is all over the place when he sleeps. Waking up is a process of reeling his mind back, folding it like a blanket. He trained himself as a boy by doing informal, lazy headcounts of the mansion's staff.

Raven, Alex and Sean were still in their rooms, fast asleep, check. Hank fell asleep in the lab, check. Moira had been awake for at least twenty minutes, but had yet to get out of bed, too busy asking herself and the ceiling over and over again what the hell was she doing with her life. Check.  
  
He almost missed Erik because Erik's mind that morning was a sequence of very familiar sentences and thought patterns. At first, Charles confused it for one of his own old memories.  
  
Erik was sitting at the kitchen, reading Charles's thesis. Not the finished article, but the first draft, his journal, with notes all over the margins. And he was delighting in it. In the subject matter as well as in the way Charles's mind worked, it was flattering in the most intimate of ways.  
  
Their ever growing mutual regard wasn't something they discussed, at all, but this was... too warm. Warm enough it made Charles blush and sink his head further into his pillow. His mind was still to scattered to deal with this.  
  
 _'Why can’t you harness Might so that it works for Right? The Might is there, in the bad half of people, and you can’t neglect it.'_  
  
Charles had written the quote above a page where he'd listed materials and methods, and Erik's eyes kept going back to it. Charles couldn't help it, _It's from T. H. White's 'The Once and Future King', there must be a copy or twenty somewhere in the study._  
  
Charles made the thought gentle as a breeze, but it was stil the sort of thing that would usually unnerve Erik and Charles was readying himself to apologize, but. The warmth. There was only warmth and a type of yearning Erik thought he wasn't capable of anymore.  
  
 _Get up and come have breakfast with me._  
  
That yearning would last a lifetime. That was Charles's consolation prize.

 


End file.
